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This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Joshua Landy. I'm sitting in for Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Look out of your window. What do you see?
Maybe a tree, some flowers, the occasional bird.
But are you really seeing trees, flowers and birds?
Or are you in fact just perceiving patches of green, streaks of blue and mottled plains of brown?
Our minds have a funny way of carving up the mass of sensory input before us into comfortable conceptual categories.
We say tree. We say earth, as though the two were not inextricably intertwined.
We say flower, as though there weren't hundreds of thousands of species answering to that name.
And in the meantime, countless phenomena like the space between fence posts escape our attention entirely.
What is responsible for all these reductions, omissions and distortions?
Could it be the very words we use? In short, when you look out of your window, are you seeing what you see?
Or is your language seeing it for you?
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So how about it friends? Does language influence the way we think? Some people have said that it doesn't.
The world, these people say, simply enters the mind through the senses, imprinting itself on a blank slate.
After a while, groups of impressions begin to cluster together.
Birds with birds, flowers with flowers, trees with trees, according to the patterns into which nature naturally falls.
Language has nothing to do with any of this.
That's what the empiricist thought, but it's not what Edward Sapir and Benjamin Wharf believed.
Here's what Wharf had to say on the subject.
The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena, we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face.
On the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions, which has to be organized by our minds.
In other words, the world doesn't look like trees and flowers and birds. It really looks like patches of green and streaks of blue.
Far from being a passive recipient of structures that are out there, the mind is an active imposer of order onto chaos.
We are the ones who turn the kaleidoscopic flux of impressions into a cataloged collection of concepts, with birds in this box over here and flowers in that box over there.
Or rather, it is our language that does this for us.
For according to Wharf, the language we acquired in early age determines the way we think about things.
If our language had no separate term for trees, we would see them more connect clearly as connected to the soil.
If our language had no generic term for flowers, we would understand each as distinct.
If our language focused more heavily on verbs than on nouns, then perhaps we would recognize more readily what Heraclitus said,
that everything is in motion, and nothing is ever completely still.
Recent studies have suggested that Wharf is onto something, that language really does shape the way we think about the world, really does help to create the boxes into which we force experience.
This could seem like a dispiriting view of the human condition.
It suggests that we can only think what we have words for.
That, as Wittgenstein once put it, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Boy, that's pretty depressing.
A belief like that could lead you to despair.
It could lead you to try to tear language apart, like Beckett and Heidegger, in order to get past those limits and make contact with what lies beyond.
But maybe such drastic remedies are not necessary.
Maybe all we need to do is to learn another language or two.
If the language we speak influences the way we think about the world, well then, perhaps learning more than one language could help us step back from our parochial standpoint, enable us to exit the so-called prison house of language, give us another pair of eyes, as Nietzsche would say.
Perhaps every language gets something right about the world, helps us to assimilate it to treasure it to appreciate its wonders in a different way.
Further, perhaps every language is a different way of thinking.
Perhaps new language is open up not just new aspects of the world, but new ways of approaching them, new ways of putting things together, new ways of solving problems we had thought intractable.
Alas, America today is not a time and place in which language learning is particularly prized.
Even in this country, which has such a high percentage of practicing Protestants with their admirable emphasis on everyone reading the Bible for him or herself, how many high schools teach Greek, the language in which the New Testament was recorded?
How many Americans know Hebrew, the language of those ten commandments we hear so much about?
When wonders how many even know that the Bible was written in these languages?
After all, if legend is to be believed, Ma Ferguson, the governor of Texas in the 1920s, wants declared if English is good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas.
Why is language learning such a low priority in today's America?
Because it's all about utility, my friends. More and more, education is about equipping the next generation from material success.
Best education is about equipping them to make rapid, tangible, quick-fix improvements to the world.
We require the bare minimum of our students, just the ability to order an espresso and emply, a potisserie in Paris.
And we're happy to let less popular languages, less so-called useful languages, wither on the vine.
But what if it turned out that languages on the brink of extinction are like endangered plants in the rainforest?
That they might, who knows, contain ways of thinking essential to our survival?
And what if it turned out that the long-term health of the planet depends on citizens of the world who are able to step outside their parochial perspective?
And that this, in turn, depended on them having a rich engagement with more than one language.
Not just the ability to buy a ticket to the Balchoré Ballet, but the ability to think like a Russian.
Well, if so, then maybe it's time we all developed a longer view.
Fortunately, we have with us today someone who not only speaks many languages, but is an expert on language and thought.
They're a Bauditsky, professor of psychology at Stanford University.
Lira is the author of many important articles including linguistic relativity entry in the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
Lira, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
Lira, I know that your research has tended to confirm the notion that language has an influence over thought.
Could you give us an example or two?
Sure.
So let me start by saying that the very first observation that leads people to even hypothesize that language might change.
Is the simple observation that language is really different from one another?
And for people who don't speak a lot of languages, it may seem counterintuitive just how different languages are.
So let me give you a, let's start with a purely hypothetical example.
Suppose I were to say Bush read Chomsky's latest book.
Now clearly this is hypothetical because the verb there is read, but let's just focus on that verb.
Now to say this in English, you have to include information about tense.
So you have to include whether something already happened or it's going to happen in the future.
In some languages you don't have to include information about tense.
So in one language I study Indonesian for example, you could utter the sentence without including any information about tense.
In other languages like in Russian, you would have to change the verb depending on whether the reader was male or female.
So if Laura Bush did the reading, you would use a different form of the verb than if it was George.
In Russian you also have to mark whether the event was completed or not.
So if George read the whole book from cover to cover, that would be one form of the verb, but if he just kind of skimmed it, that would be a different form of the verb.
In languages like Turkish, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information.
So if we were speaking Turkish and I had actually witnessed this miraculous event with my own two eyes, I would use one form of the verb.
But if it was something I heard about or something I infured maybe from a speech that Bush gave, then I would use a different form of the verb.
Other languages have onerific systems where depending on how you feel about the person you're talking about or the person you're talking to, you would change the linguistic forms.
And so in all of these languages you have to notice something and remember something very different just in order to be able to utter this one verb and that's just one word in the sentence.
And so when people have looked at these kinds of differences, the very first thing I notice is, hey, speakers of different languages must really be paying attention to and encoding very different things about their environments just to be able to speak grammatically otherwise they wouldn't be understood in that language.
So that's where the idea started.
And then what people have been trying to do since then is come up with good empirical examples showing that the differences between languages actually yield differences in thought because there is a possibility that just because languages force us to say different parts about the world doesn't mean that we notice different things.
It's possible that everyone notices all the same stuff about the world and you just express a small proportion of the stuff that you know.
So the question is, is it the case that everyone notices all the same stuff, sees all the same stuff, or does language really shape your attention, shape the way you see the world, the way you categorize it, the way you perceive it?
And is there an example you have ready to mind of a way in which a particular language does indeed focus our attention on something rather than something else?
Sure, let me give you three examples.
And I'll take these three because they focus on different parts of the language and thought question.
So let me start with the example of spatial words and I think this is a particularly deep influence of language on thought because through this research we found that humans are actually capable of a lot more than we thought they were.
We used to think that there are certain abilities that are just beyond human capacity.
Now there are some people in the world who are very, very good at orienting, staying oriented, knowing which way they're always going.
And there are for example groups in Aboriginal Australia who anthropologists have been studying for a long time.
There is always a puzzle about why is it that these folks are so good at orienting.
What turns out their languages don't have words like left and right, or forward and back and instead they put everything in some kind of cardinal direction space, so for example, North-South-East-West.
Now English of course also has North-South-East-West, but we're not required to use these terms all the time.
In languages like these for example one language I study this puk-tai or this is a language in the North of Australia.
In this language you have to say things like there's an ant on your southwest leg or the coffee cup is to the east of your water glass.
Now in order to be able to speak this language you have to stay oriented. You have to always know which way you're facing.
And the difference in being able to stay oriented between speakers of puk-tai or for example and speakers of English is vast.
So I've given lots of talks on this question and I often ask whole room full of academics, all with PhDs and so on.
Just close your eyes and point southwest.
Very few people can do this.
People point in every possible direction.
When I asked the same question of five year olds in Australia, these puk-tai or five year olds, they pointed with no hesitation and they were right.
I of course had to have a compass to check them because I didn't know which way it was, but they were spot on.
So we find these incredible.
This is worked by Steve Levinson's group in Holland.
They find these incredible differences between speakers of different languages where you can find people who have a number of people.
They find people who have an ability, this ability to orient which we thought was reserved for other kinds of animals.
So we know that birds can do it, but then people say well they have magnets and their beaks.
They have other kinds of hardware.
It turns out that if your language requires you to pay attention to something, you can learn to do it and you can actually do it incredibly.
Could I just interrupt you here and we can come back to the other examples, but I can imagine a rejection of the form.
It's not really the language that it's doing. It's the cultural system. It's the requirement every day to say I have an aunt on my southwest leg.
Is there a, what, what, even tell the difference between cultural practice and language in this context?
Language of course is one part of culture, right?
So language is part of the whole cultural system.
What language is really good at doing is fossilizing things in your culture.
So once something has made it into your grammatical system, it's going to be there for a while.
It's going to be pretty hard to change. And you have to learn it just in order to be able to participate in the culture.
There's no, you know, everyone grows up speaking a language and native speakers of the language speak their languages grammatically.
And so everyone has to go through this training.
And there are a lot of ideas that are embedded in languages that took our cultures a really long time to develop.
So the idea of number, for example, only some languages have exact number.
The idea of number, the whole numerical system took a really long time for us as humans to come up with.
But if you learn English, you don't have to come up with the idea of number all on your own.
You're just by virtue of having to learn English, you learn number.
And that's a huge cognitive advantage.
Right. What are your other examples?
Let me give you another example. This is a more silly one.
It's about grammatical gender. So in languages closer to English, languages like French or Spanish, German, Russian, all nouns fall into a grammatical category.
In languages like Spanish or French, for example, there are two categories masculine and feminine.
So the kinds of articles and adjective endings and so on that you would use to talk about something that's grammatically masculine or the same as you would for biological male.
And so the question is, does that mean that people actually think of things that are grammatically masculine as being more like boys and things that are grammatically feminine as being more like girls?
So let me give you an example.
And the word for the sun is feminine in German and it's masculine in Spanish.
And the moon is the reverse, it's feminine in Spanish and masculine in German.
So does that mean that Germans think of the moon as being more male like and Spanish speakers think of the moon as being more female like?
Well, one very simple way to find this out is just to ask people to describe objects for you.
So we did a study like this. We brought people in and we got Spanish English by Linguists in Germany, English by Linguists.
We can test them in English because English doesn't have grammatical gender.
So it's a nice neutral language for doing this.
And we just asked them give us a number of adjectives to describe the moon or the sun.
We had a bunch of different objects that have opposite grammatical genders in the two languages.
Well, it turns out that the kinds of adjectives people come up with are very strongly guided by grammatical gender.
So to describe basic things like describe a bridge, German speaker say, beautiful, fragile, extended Spanish speakers say, strong, long, towering things like that.
And these are not situations where we asked people imagine you were to mate with a bridge, what kind of bridge would it be?
We simply asked them, describe a bridge and they can't come up with these very gender descriptions.
Right. Maybe this is an obvious question falling off of what you just said, but what are the practical consequences of these distortions imposed on us by our native language?
Of course, language plays a really important role in our society and our culture.
So let me give you a couple of examples from the practical world.
Here's a here's a silly practical example of local one to California.
A few years ago the California Plungro's Association petitioned the FDA to be able to change the name of their product, which was called prunes, to a new name, which would be dried plums.
Now you might think prunes and dried plums are the same thing, and indeed they are, but people aren't buying prunes and they weren't buying prunes for a very obvious reason.
Prunes live in a really bad linguistic neighborhood. Prunes are in the same neighborhood as geriatric issues of all sorts, bad digestive disorders, old people.
You know, they are just associated with all kinds of bad things in American culture.
Dryd plums on the other hand are greatly linguistic neighborhood, they are plums are delicious fruit and dried plums sound like a great snack.
They are under their tomatoes.
That's right, they are next to dried apricots and dried apples and mangoes and so on.
And so they went through this whole process, there is a really long process to change the name of their product, and they succeeded.
And in fact, dried plums do sell better than prunes. When people now go to the store, they see dried plums and they think, that sounds like a delicious snack, as opposed to, that sounds like something that's a good thing.
That sounds like something I'll have to eat when I'm old.
And so that's a very successful use of language to shape thought, even within a culture.
Of course, some of the practical applications of the kinds of cross linguistic differences I described, with the direction terms it's obvious, right?
If you're lost in the desert and you have been taught how to stay oriented, obviously you wouldn't be lost then in the first place.
But you would be much better off if you had a way to keep track of where you were going, and if you oriented like I do by left and right, which is just isn't going to help you very much unless you have a grid.
So it sounds like some languages are simply better at doing certain things than other languages.
I have to ask a question, I would be remiss not to ask this. I know that Robert Harrison would definitely ask this.
Is it Italian the language of love?
So people have for a long time had all kinds of theories about what different languages are better than worse for.
So for a while people said clearly Hebrew is the language of oratory and Arabic is the language of argument and so on.
In fact, I think Frederick the Great of Prussia was famous for saying that he said, "I speak English to my accountants, French to my ambassadors.
Italian to my mistress, Latin to my god, and German to my horse."
Now, of course he came up to these categories entirely out of his own prejudice and they're based on empirical evidence.
He was the emperor though, so I guess it's imperial evidence.
Sorry.
But people have certainly had these kinds of associations.
We don't have any good empirical evidence suggesting that some languages are better for love than others.
But if lots of people believe that Italian is better for love, then that belief in itself is already good enough.
But in general, it may obviously be the statement of the emperor's sense of search.
But is it actually absurd? I mean, does your research suggest that all languages are more or less comparable in the kinds of things you can do in them?
Or does it suggest rather that there might be a language that it's best to argue in, for example?
I think it's definitely the case that each language has within it a toolkit.
It's every language is a set of tools and some toolkits are better for certain tasks than others.
So in a language that requires you to keep track of direction, if you're speaking that language, you're going to be better able to describe and keep track of directions.
In a language that has many color words, it's going to be a lot easier to keep track of colors and so on.
And every language has a different set of tools embedded in it.
So it is absolutely the case that different languages are better suited or were suited for different kinds of tasks.
And often they are adapted to the environments that people live in in the world that people have to navigate.
We don't know which languages are best for arguing, for example.
Usually whichever language you speak most fluently is the best choice.
Okay, so when we have conversations about language, I think we often tend to focus on nouns.
I certainly was guilty of that a minute ago.
What about syntax?
I mean, think of a language like a German which from the Anglo-centric point of view seems to have a rather
a barative grammatical structure.
Is that something that comes as naturally to young learners of German as the structure of English comes naturally to a
different language is a different amount of time to learn even for native learners.
So there are some languages that have, we of course have, I should say there are 6,000 languages in the world.
And we have good data only on a very small handful of these languages.
Most of them are European languages.
And they are kind of the boring set of languages if you look across the world.
So this is only the tip of the iceberg.
But comparing for example the rate of English acquisition to the rate of Russian acquisition,
it takes a lot longer to learn Russian for Russian speaking kids in English,
partially because there is so much more inflection in Russian.
There is case marking and gender marking and a perfective aspect that is very complicated.
So there are all these things you have to figure out with each noun.
You have to figure out which of these 87 types of forms you are going to use.
And so we definitely find differences in acquisition time.
And in second language acquisition people also have observed this.
So I had a very close colleague in anthropology once who was an expert on Navajo.
And so he was one of the only non-native speakers of Navajo.
And he had spent probably 40 years studying Navajo, he had written the dictionary and so on.
And when he described his experience in learning Navajo, he said,
after all these years when I produced a sentence,
Native Navajo speakers look at me and say,
"Well, you couldn't say it that way.
Wouldn't be the way we'd say it."
So he got to a point where he could make himself sort of understood.
And people certainly report that going from one language to going from French to Italian,
for example, might be a whole lot easier than going from French to Navajo.
You're listening to KZSU Stanford, I'm Joshua Landy sitting in for Robert Harrison.
And I'm talking with Lyro Boroditsky, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University about the connection between thought and language.
Lyro, we're just talking about switching back and forth from language to another.
Tell us a little bit about bilingualism. You're bilingual yourself, I take it.
That's right. I speak at least English and Russian.
Russian is my native language.
I was just in Russian, I actually had this very frustrating realization that I can't speak both at the same time.
I can speak one or the other. I can't do both.
That was actually a question I had.
I mean, what is the brain of a bilingual like?
Is it as it were divided into two language areas which may in the be conceptual zones, in a sense,
if your research is correct, I'm committed to it.
Or is there more of a synthesis, more interplay between these linguistic regions?
The answer I'm afraid is it's more complicated.
It depends on what kind of bilingual you are.
So some people, people who use both languages integrated into their life,
intermingled in the same kinds of contexts, then those languages are much more intermingled in their brain.
You actually find them closer together.
The representations for the languages closer together, and it's very much easier to switch and so on.
For people like me who only speak one language in one context and another language in a completely different context,
it's a lot harder to switch and the areas are much more separated.
And there are many other ways of being bilingual or multilingual.
In fact, many more people in the world are multilingual than monolingual.
America is kind of the exception in this American England emafraid.
I have noticed of myself that when I'm speaking French, I become a bit of a different person.
Even more snooty.
No offense to French people.
I think it's probably because my French comes from Parisians.
How about you? Do you find yourself becoming a bit of a different person when you're speaking Russian?
A lot of bilinguals report this, that they feel like a different person
when they're speaking in other language.
And there actually is a little bit of evidence on this.
People who are Spanish English bilinguals were asked to or videotape all they're interacting.
They're speaking either Spanish or English.
And then naive observers who couldn't hear what they were saying just rated how affable they seemed how it's going and so on.
And there were some differences in personality, these personality dimensions depending on the language.
One thing that always complicates this is that often we have certain set of associations with a language.
So for me, Russian is the language of my childhood and for you, French might be the language you speak in Paris.
And that of course is a very particular set of associations.
And so if you just reminded me of Paris, would I have a similar personality shift as you were required me to speak French?
So it might not necessarily, maybe it gets back to the point by telling being the language of love.
Maybe it's a matter of if you think it is, then it is for you.
I definitely think that language creates the very same kinds of associations that can be created in many other ways.
And so if you associate Italian with the language of love, then you'll often be thinking about love when speaking Italian.
It sounds as though we're actually talking about the effect of language in various different domains.
Would I be right in thinking that it applies not only in the area of what we actually attend to in the first place,
but also in the way we think about it.
So your example of the moon and the sun, for example, the bridge.
And also perhaps the kinds of things we link things to in our minds.
So those all those dead metaphors that our language uses to induce us to connect various things into conceptual categories.
Are these all ways in which language effects are thinking?
I completely agree with you, language can affect our thinking in all those different ways.
It can point attention, it can create categories, it can create connections between ideas.
Sometimes it just gives us a tool, kind of a bit of technology to be able to solve some problems.
And number words would be a good example for that or spatial words of particular type would be a good example of that.
And there's an infinite number of other ways.
It's a, if you think about how much of your daily life is dedicated to some kind of verbal expression.
It's certainly a extremely dominant thing in our lives.
I often start with this example with my undergraduates.
I ask them to think which cognitive faculty would they most hate to lose?
When people think about this for a while, students often say, "Oh, I'd hate to lose my sense of vision."
Or, "I'd hate to lose my sense of hearing."
Nearly never does someone say, "I'd hate to lose my ability to speak language."
But of course, if you lost vision or hearing or even both, you'd still be able to be a student at Stanford
and have a family and have a job and get an education.
But imagine you lost your ability to speak a language or never learn the language in the first place.
You couldn't be a student at Stanford.
You couldn't be integrated in a society in any way.
Language is such a ubiquitous part of our, so central to the human experience that we take it completely for granted.
And yet you just couldn't be a human without it.
Right.
Let me, if you don't mind me playing devil's advocate for that one.
Let me try to pose a challenge or two to the theory that language influences thought.
Let's start from something you mentioned before that the idea that many languages don't have words for number.
But isn't it true that most people do okay in ascertaining the quantity of objects in a particular context?
And even primates do pretty well at quote unquote counting, right?
Even though obviously they don't have language.
It's certainly the case that you can keep track of number in a different way
if you don't have number words.
But number words happen to be a really great tool for counting.
And so cultures that don't have number words either have to develop some other way of keeping track.
So they might draw dots in the sand or they might learn to group things in fors or fives or do a mental abacus or something like this.
Or they just don't develop any cognitive technology for doing it.
In that case it actually is very difficult for them to keep track of exact numbers.
And so they show what looks like cognitive deficits, right?
Of course there are just a different way of keeping track of the world when you live in a natural world.
What does it matter if you have seven fish?
The sevenness of the fish is not important.
It's how big they are, how tasty they are, and so on.
It's a very different set of things that you're going to be focusing on.
But it certainly is the case that having those number words is very useful.
In fact when you prevent English speakers from being able to use number words when you stop them from being able to use language, they get much, much worse at keeping track of quantities.
So then in that case couldn't we say that rather than language shaping thought what it's doing is reinforcing a capacity that's already there even without language?
If you want to say that when infants are born, they already have a system of number in place.
And for some reason it took human culture thousands of years to invent this system of numbers.
You can say that.
I mean it's not impossible.
This is the old platonic view that all ideas already exist in some sense, in some sphere, out there, or in our minds.
And we're simply recollecting them from past incarnations of our souls or these days you would say from our genetic endowment.
But it seems to me that first of all we do learn about all kinds of new things that didn't exist very recently.
And also that different cultures end up with very different ideas.
And so whether or not those ideas existed in some sense I think is less interesting than the fact that they're very different final outcomes depending on which culture you're going to grow up in.
What do you make of the sometimes surprising abilities of infants?
For example to be able to recognize when an object is the same or different?
Long before the acquisition of language?
I think it's so let me dispute the claim that it's long before the acquisition of language because in fact infants, by the time they come out of the womb, are already incredibly sensitive to the properties of their particular language.
So they can tell for example whether the language they've been hearing is a head initial or a head final language.
So if you play them a language that has a different structure they reorient or they listen more or less.
They've grown accustomed to the sound of their mother's voice and all kinds of acoustic properties of the language.
So language learning starts from the very, very beginning and even before visual perception, right?
Because it's dark in the womb. You're not getting a lot of visual information.
And from the very start you're getting a stream of language information and all kinds of other perceptual information in at the same time.
But it is absolutely the case that we're born with a rich set of abilities and abilities to learn.
And we're also surrounded by incredible amounts of perceptual information that we have to make sense of.
One way to think about language in this context is as a guide, it's a cultural guide to what is important in your culture.
So perception is incredibly promiscuous and we're getting so much information every millisecond through your perceptual organs.
You can't possibly process it all at the same time. In fact we have lots of evidence suggesting people process only a very tiny proportion of the information that they're getting.
Now what proportion do you choose to process? What do you actually focus on? Well, you could ask your language. Your language is the set of things that people in your culture have found important in the past, right?
So it's a useful guide to the world that says pay attention to these things not only will you need them to be able to speak your language, but those are actually the cognitively useful things that other people in your culture have discovered.
Yeah, that's totally fascinating. Let me try one last devil's advocate, you know, and we can move on.
What about neologisms? You said that our language is this cultural endowment that helps us to pay attention to the things that our culture considers important and disregard those that it doesn't.
But every now and again people seem to bump up against the limitations and want to go beyond and it seems they're in cases like that surely there's a thought first and then language is invented to capture it.
I think that's true in a whole lot of cases. So there's kind of this old Orwellian example of in 1984 he writes about a government that tries to limit people's thought by a list of things that are important.
People's thought by limiting the language and so that all kinds of things are taken out of the language and the idea of being that if you don't have a word like freedom then you can't conceive of freedom.
I think that idea in the extreme is impossible. Clearly people are the ones who create languages they create words and so someone has to be able to think the thought before they have they can invent a word.
But the question is how many people have to think the thought first it could be one person that invents it so let's go back to the idea of numbers.
Not everyone has to invent the idea of numbers very very few people actually would be able to do so. And yet when someone goes through an events system like this even coming up with words one two three and four invites thoughts like five six and seven right it invites you to keep going and to keep creating the system.
And so once you have a small system like that in place it actually continues to generate useful useful abstractions useful ideas.
So it is the case that you have to be able to have a thought for creating a lot of things but sometimes creating the words can also help you create new thoughts.
So your picture isn't a fully deterministic one.
It's a multibly deterministic one and it's a picture where thought creates language and language creates thought and culture is an incredibly important part of all this.
There simply isn't a reason to limit those hypotheses.
We had a dear colleague here unfortunately passed away last year Richard Rottie.
And his view was that everything is a matter of vocabulary.
There isn't a right way of getting the world and there isn't a wrong way of getting the world.
There are just different languages that we can use to talk about it.
All of which are talking to be neutral right.
But some of which are more useful and some of which are less useful than others.
So I guess I wanted to ask you a Rottie in question.
Would you say that all languages are essentially cognitively neutral?
So it's not that let's say the Germans are getting it right about the moon and especially getting it wrong.
Maybe that's a bad example.
Or would you say that rather some languages actually do a better job of capturing certain things about the world?
And some do a worse job.
I think languages develop pragmatically.
People develop languages pragmatically.
We develop them to solve particular problems that we have, things that we want to keep track of or not.
And some things get frozen in our languages.
So for example the grammatical gender system, there's no reason why the moon or the sun hasn't to be masculine or feminine.
But it turns out that in the grammatical system grammatical gender plays a really important role and that it helps you keep track of what goes with what, when you have all that agreement, it actually makes it cognitively easier to understand longer sentences, for example, more complex sentences.
So.
So you're making a plea in favor of gender language?
You know languages can be made every possible way.
And all those possible ways basically exist as far as we can tell in the world's languages.
But it sounds like for you the language is doing something better is merely a language that is facilitating communication.
So if I have more agreements, then it's easier to understand.
So it's more redundant.
That's only one criteria.
Obviously language is do better for the purpose of being able to remember the things that are important for you to remember in your environment.
For being able to stay oriented, for being able to keep track of time, to be able to remember colors, whatever it is that's important for you in your culture, in your environment.
Those are the things that we try to maximize our languages for because we as humans are the creators of the languages.
I don't think there's any objective way to measure which language really captures the world the way it is better or worse than any other language.
It is simply a matter of what are you going to use it for?
But to go back to an example you mentioned earlier, presumably some of these operational languages are getting it better about direction.
They're getting it better about absolute direction but not about left-right kinds of direction.
So it's a different way of organizing space that we have.
It doesn't work very well for orienting a natural environment, for example, when you don't already know where you're going.
But it can be really good for creating abstractions.
So for example, how would we ever know to put the salad fork to the left of the dinner fork?
If we didn't have left and right, in putting it southwest one time and northeast another time, it'd be complete madness.
You have to have a convention like that and you need left and right.
And that practice doesn't make any sense in a culture that doesn't have left and right.
It doesn't make any sense to keep switching the two forks around, which is what it looks like to them.
You're listening to KZSU Stanford, Joshua Landy, sitting in Robert Harrison.
I'm talking with Lyra Bard, its Keep Professor Psychology at Stanford about the connection between thought and language.
We were just talking about the relative utility of various languages, what they help us to do.
The pragmatics, it almost sounds like you're offering a Darwinian explanation for languages.
Here is an environment which is really important to do such and such.
And therefore, the language evolves in such a way as to make it easier to do such a touch.
Is that about right?
I think that's about right. I wouldn't limit it to just the physical environment.
I think the set of cultural beliefs and practices also very importantly shape what has to be included or not included in the language and these things go together and influence each other.
So once you solidify something into the grammar then it becomes really stuck in part of the culture and so you have to carry it on in the culture and so on.
Right. Interesting.
Okay, so let's say I'm somebody who's very good at telling my right from my left but I'm not somebody who's very good at telling compass directions.
If I go and learn a language in which it's vital to keep track of compass directions, can I overcome my deficiency?
Absolutely. In fact, a lot of the studies we've done in our lab do specifically that you teach people a new way of talking.
And the question is does that just teach you a new way of saying the thoughts that you already have or does it actually teach you a new way of thinking?
And the answer is when you learn a new language you're actually learning a new way of thinking. You're learning new ways of seeing the world of categorizing the world that can give you new abilities.
So here's a dreamy philosophical question.
Nietzsche was, of course, famously a perspective. He believed that each of us has his own perspective.
But he also seems to believe that a kind of perspective of objectivity was possible. If you just combine enough perspectives.
So could you imagine, at least hypothetically, somebody who knew all the world's languages or perhaps even a language, you know, not Esperanto, but some artificial language which combined all of the relevant features of the world's languages.
Could you imagine a situation like that in which we were actually getting maximal contact with the world?
I think, so first of all, there will be lots of languages to learn. And many of them, so right now there are about 6,000 languages remaining.
Huge proportion of languages have died off. So would you have to include the languages that we don't have any information about? I don't know.
But even so, even if you were able to learn all of the world's languages, all of the languages that humans have ever spoken, you would still be limited by the fact that you have the human perceptual system and the human input systems.
And if you just had a different perceptual system that of a butterfly or that of a lizard, you would be getting very different information out of the world, seeing the world very differently, you have different sensors and so on.
So you might be able to achieve some kind of pan-human interpretation of the world, but it would still be through the eyes of a human and not in any kind of objective sense.
Right, now you almost sounded like a manual can't. Well, creatures with constitutions other than ours are going to do this differently.
Now we're almost close to the Beckett fantasy. We're going to have to smash our way through language in order to see the world's butterflies.
It's not going to help to smash just through language. You're going to have to get a new set of sensors and everything. You've just come equipped with a kind of, so for example, for perceiving color, you have three types of sensors.
And there's an infinite variety of physical stimuli that we can't distinguish because all information gets reduced down to the three channels that we have for perceiving color.
Lots of other creatures will have four or twelve different channels. They will be able to perceive energy in the range where we can't visually perceive it or feel it in any other way at all.
It's just getting rid of languages and going to help with that level of problem.
So we're doomed. All right. What about literature in all of this?
Clearly, literary uses of language are a little bit different from everyday uses of language.
I mean, take one example. Poetry is often very heavy on live metaphors, nearly coined metaphors that resonate.
Does this affect the way that we think, does it affect the law?
Could it affect the way we think if we read enough poetry or read some poetry enough?
It's definitely the case that metaphors or any kind of novel or vivid language creates new mental representations in your mind.
It gets you to think about things you've never thought of before, create new connections.
So it definitely, being exposed to different types of language definitely enriches your internal mental life.
We also know that the language of poets changes as they continue to write.
So there's this wonderful recent example of the two brownings when someone analyzed their poetry before they met.
And as they got to know each other, and you could see how their language changed.
They started out being quite different.
And towards the end of their life, their language actually converged.
And so you had a lot more syntactic agreement between their poetry and so on.
It's very romantic.
It's a really nice--
It weren't even writing an Italian.
It's right.
It's a really nice way of looking at a relationship through the syntactic structures.
That's beautiful.
What about--
Okay, so it's still in the room of literature.
What about fancy uses of syntags?
So a lot of the authors that I'm particularly fascinated with tend to place very heavy cognitive demands on the reader because they're really driving the English or French sentence to its syntactic limits.
I mean, they're so in the case of Bruce, for example, or Henry James.
They're still using syntax correctly.
But placing very heavy demands upon the reader to hold everything in place.
Could this be a training ground for thinking in a more sophisticated way, for example,
or holding more things in the mind at once, or higher arcizing information, things like this?
It's certainly a very plausible hypothesis.
We don't have psychological and empirical evidence on this, but I can very easily envision an experiment where you lock people in a room and have them read
"proust" for 12 hours and test them on.
This is an experiment. This is torture.
But do you do experiments that are like this in your laboratory?
We haven't done any experiments with literature per se, but it's definitely the kind of idea that is possible to test.
What we usually test is looking across languages, things that are harder and easier to express in the language information that appears or doesn't appear.
And then we see what influence does this have.
But this would certainly be another way of doing it.
Presumably metaphors would be an excellent case in point, rather than things that really cannot be translated across languages.
Yeah, I feel like nothing can be translated across languages.
There is no such thing as perfect translation.
Certainly you can have good enough translation for a particular set of purposes, but just to go back to the grammatical gender example.
Suppose I were to write a poem where the sun and the moon are having a love affair, and the sun pursues the moon around the sky and is never ending.
Chase.
Now, in the original language that I write, the poem, "The Sun is masculine and the moon is feminine."
Now, we want to translate the poem into another language, but it just so happens that the sun is feminine in this language, and the moon is masculine.
Well, you have a very different poem now.
Now, you have this feminine sun chasing after the masculine moon.
That's a very different set of ideas.
There's no way to translate that poem in a way that would really carry the same meaning.
Are there other subtle problems of translation that one might not think of?
I think if anyone has ever tried really doing translating, you immediately come across not just subtle, but really giant.
Glaring problems.
I was thinking a little bit about the way in which English, for example, has such an extraordinary rich vocabulary, and tends to build certain things into its verbs.
Whereas French, for example, these are obviously the two languages I'm most familiar with.
French seems to often keep its verbs rather simple, and then append adverbs as it were to make up for that.
Does that create a difference in effect between the same paragraph or in English and the same paragraph, translate into French or vice versa?
That's a great question.
So one difference that I think you're describing is in motion verbs.
English has a lot of verbs that describe different matters of motion, so you can saunter across the room.
You can swagger across the room.
And so on.
There are all these different ways of moving.
And in other languages in a lot of romance languages, you would use a much more neutral verb that define the path rather than the matters.
You would say he traversed the room, and then you could add a set of other words, saying, waltzingly or swaggeringly or something like that.
The vocabulary for different matters of motion tends to be a lot less.
And so the verb usually encodes the path rather than the matter.
And in fact, when people have compared passages written in English and Spanish, for example,
the Spanish is similar to French in this matter.
The feelings that people get out of a piece of text are very different.
What English speakers seem to get are all the transitions.
So moving from one point to another tends to be described in a lot of detail, whereas in Spanish the way it tends to be done is there's a lot of scene setting.
The scene is described very richly.
And then the person is in the next place.
And the transition just kind of, you know, there is no long tedious transitions if you're describing someone,
and then the person would be telling with heavy bags from the train station to their hotel in English.
The description would include a lot of slogging and tripping and so on.
Whereas in Spanish you would describe the fact that there was snow on the ground, and there was lots of mud.
For example, in the bags are heavy.
And then the person would be tired at their hotel in the next episode.
And so you would infer all of the slogging and tripping and so on by virtue of the terrain and the bags and the tired.
That's totally fascinating.
Some people have thought that certain philosophies even originate from certain features of a language.
I mean, you know, Hebrew famously doesn't tend to use the verb to be, at least not in the present.
And maybe that's why, you know, how to go, for example, he's fascinated by the concept of being, non-quincidentally isn't Israeli.
He's working with one of those languages where the verb to be comes up almost all the time.
Do you think that's possible to certain philosophies originate in part driven by the national language and question?
I think it's definitely possible.
Again, we don't have, we don't have an exact empirical study of something like this.
But let me give you one example in American and English philosophy and naive philosophy.
The idea of free will is this very interesting paradox where, on the one hand, we all feel like there should be a free will because we feel like we're determining our own actions and so on.
And on the other hand, if you take a materialist assumption, it seems like there couldn't possibly be a free will.
This is not a paradox and a lot of traditions of thought, so a lot of Asian traditions of thoughts.
The idea of free will is just not that interesting of an idea because it's obvious you don't have it.
It's just in the culture, the way the language and the culture come together, there isn't this idea of an individual completely separate from the rest of their environment, free determining their own behavior as we see it.
That's reflecting the structure of the verbs.
It's reflected in, well, it's reflected in many different grammatical properties.
One, one side of properties, for example, that make a similar prediction is how people tend to describe other people.
So in English, we might say he likes to run or he is funny or he is smart.
In Russian, you would use a noun phrase, say he would say he is a runner or he is a comedian or he is a genius.
And in Russian also, you don't use the copula, the verb to be in the present tense, so he is a comedian, he genius, she runner and so on.
And so you're creating this timeless category that someone fits into.
In Japanese, you're much more likely to describe what the person is doing at that moment.
So when we've asked Russian speakers, English speakers and Japanese speakers to describe pictures of the same people, we get very different descriptions.
So Russian speakers will say something like, they'll look at a picture of a man with a cat smoking a cigarette sitting by the piano and they will say he's a humanist.
And English speakers, of course, never say anything like this.
They say he likes to smoke or he likes to play the piano or he likes cats.
And Japanese speakers will say he is smoking or he is playing the piano or he is holding a cat.
Describing things in a much more contextual way.
Well, Lira, where do you see your research going from now and where do you hope it will ultimately lead?
Of course, the question of whether language shapes thought is part of the old question about the origin of human thought.
What is the very nature of human thought?
Why do we think the way we do?
How do we come to be the way we are?
Where do our thoughts come from?
And so I think by looking at languages in the way that language helps shape and construct thought, we can not only understand what is basic and universal in human cognition,
but also understand how language and culture is conspire to make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.
Well, Lira Burditsky, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
My thanks also to Robert Harrison for letting me sit in today.
And to you, the listeners for bearing with me.
Robert Harrison will be back next week. We'll see you then.
[Music]
Don't think me.
We're the whole one.
Two for you.
And the only chance I've never done so.
My love will be our same love.
When they have loved one so scared to me.
Their logic ties me up and directs me.
And so do, do, do.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get to.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want me to.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get to.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want to get.
The poetry pieces and politicians.
And words to say are their positions.
Words that scream for your son.
No one's jumping, they're just new show.
When they have loved one so scared to me.
Their logic ties you up and directs you.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get to.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want me to.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get to.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want me to get.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get to.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want me to go.
The thought that I got, the soul I want to get.
The thought that I got, the innocence that you want me to get.